06/06/2024
VDARE EDITOR Peter Brimelow writes: We’ve finally gotten around to posting our VDARE Conference’s Sunday morning wrap-up panel, held April 28. Hey, it’s worth waiting for. And this is metapolitics!
WRAP-UP AT THE CASTLE: A Trump Landslide? Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Derbyshire, Sailer, Woods, Taylor.
— VDARE (@vdare) June 6, 2024
VDARE’s April 28 Conference Panel Video @Steve_Sailer @KeithWoodsYT @HarrisonHSmith pic.twitter.com/5h33bl0Avi
[PETER BRIMELOW] Thanks for coming back here. I’m Peter Brimelow, the Editor of VDARE.com. We’re coming to you, for those of you on the live stream, from the Berkeley Springs Castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where VDARE.com has its headquarters and its conference center.
So this is a wrap-up panel for as many of the speakers we’ve been able to keep pinned down. A couple have escaped. Over there is Harrison Smith. Tell us who you are, Harrison.
[HARRISON] I’m Harrison Smith. I host The Morning Show on infowars.com.
[PETER] Harrison needs to get to the airport today. What time are you flying?
[HARRISON] Around five.
[PETER] So if anybody’s going to … Dulles?
[HARRISON] Yes.
[PETER] If anybody can take him to Dulles, that’s a helpful contribution. [They did! The Berkeley Springs Castle is less than two hours from all D.C. airports!]
[PETER] Next is John Derbyshire.
[DERB] You flying Boeing, Harrison?
[HARRISON] Unfortunately, maybe so.
[PETER] John is a podcaster for us, Radio Derb, and a prolific writer..
[DERB] Yes, that’s me. I’m a podcaster. I’ve been doing freelance journalism for more than 40 years now and ending up doing most of my stuff for VDARE.com. I’m very curious and interested to know what happens next in the VDARE saga. I’m sure something will, and I believe it will be good.
[STEVE SAILER] I’m Steve Sailer. Not as much of a veteran as John, but not too far back. Yeah, I’ve been affiliated with VDARE.com since the year 2000. You can see my blog posts at VDARE. So thanks for inviting me.
[PETER] Tell us about your book, Steve.
[STEVE] It’s an anthology of my work from1973 to 2023. 1973 is a one paragraph letter to the editor that pretty much prefigures everything I wrote after that. You can buy a copy here for $30, or online from Passage Press.
[PETER] And tell us about the leather-bound edition.
[STEVE] Yeah, put in paperback when you’re searching for Passage Press NOTICING, Sailer, or you’ll see the hardback price of $395. So that’s for collectors, let’s say!
[UPDATE: NOTICING is now on Kindle.]
[PETER] By the way, the bookstore will be open after this session’s over for not only Steve’s book, but also for a number of VDARE.com products as well. [PB: At this point, I should have mentioned Steve’s book America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance,” which VDARE.com published in 2008. But I forgot.]
Keith.
[KEITH WOODS] Yeah, I was reading Steve’s book this morning, actually, so I highly recommend it.
I’m Keith Woods, made content on a number of platforms, YouTube, Twitter. Been on Substack recently, KeithWoods.pub republished on The Unz Review. Not quite a veteran, but a privilege to be in this esteemed company.
[JARED TAYLOR] My name is Jared Taylor. I’m the editor of American Renaissance.
And I was overhearing a discussion between some of the young sprouts and someone suggested that I should be pointed out as someone who’s been standing up for white people before it was even cool!
[PETER] So I’ve not said very much at this conference, as you may have noticed, but I would just take a moment to make a couple of observations.
There is a poll out this morning, a CNN poll, which shows that Trump’s lead over Biden is now six points [CNN Poll: Trump maintains lead over Biden in 2024 matchup as views on their presidencies diverge, CNN, April 28, 2024]. In other words, it doesn’t seem to have been hurt at all by this farce in New York. CNN doesn’t like this very much.
But I always want to know what the white share is, what is Trump’s share of the white vote? Because that’s really the critical issue.
Americans are profoundly divided by race and their politics divide profoundly by race as well.
Well, CNN didn’t even bother to report the white share.
But generally speaking, Trump’s white share, while better than Bush One or — even Bush Two for that matter — it’s not great.
I think the last time I found an estimate, it was something like 53%. Whereas, of course, the Democrats absolutely dominate their ethnic groups, getting close to 90% of blacks, for example.
So I regard this as a seismic torsion under American politics. Because the question is, when will the white vote tip decisively to the Republicans.
If you look at the makeup of the parties, you see that the two parties, their base votes, are nothing like the same.
The last calculation we did is that if you factor out the Democrats, about 51% or 52%, either non-white or homosexual or Jewish (you have to do some adjustments to avoid double counting).
A chart we made of this in 2018
So that means that essentially less than half of the Democrat vote is what you might call normal white Americans.
Under those circumstances, you see housing projects and things like that tip. I do expect the white vote to tip decisively at some point in here.
And this could be the year, because I think the depth of distress about the obvious treason at the border is now very widespread.
Immigration regularly polls in the CNN poll, it polls as the second highest issue — right behind the economy.
So what this means is, I still think that it’s possible we could see a landslide this year.
And that’s particularly because of the other poll that has already been mentioned here, which actually ran on Thursday, it’s a Harris poll. And they reveal the fascinating information that something like a majority of Americans are in favor of mass deportations.
Among Republicans, it gets up to nearly 70%, but it’s over 40% with Democrats. It’s quite extraordinary.
[Exclusive poll: America warms to mass deportations, by Margaret Talev, Russell Contreras, Axios, April 28, 2024].
EXCLUSIVE POLL: Americans are open to Trump’s harshest immigration plans.
Half — including 42% of Democrats — say they’d support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, per a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll. https://t.co/fXPKxpGlQj pic.twitter.com/UIWn2SRKn7
— Axios (@axios) April 25, 2024
And of course, the political class absolutely does not want to hear this, but it does mean that there is, as I say, a fault line underlying American politics, which could break at some point.
Now, this analysis is profoundly informed by Steve Sailer’s analysis, which he first did in early 2000 for VDARE.com, pointing out that Karl Rove was wrong to think the way to the future was to win more minorities — that what the Republicans should do instead is inreach, to the white vote.
Do you want to comment on that, Steve?
[STEVE] Yes. Well, I want to thank you for pointing out the work I did about 20 years ago.
[PETER] 25 years!
[STEVE] Unfortunately, I’m going to defer to your analysis of the latest data, because I haven’t actually been keeping up.
But part of I wrote about in 2008 or 2009 is that the Democrats basically have developed a Coalition Of The Fringes to exploit the growing diversity of the American population They find all the groups, and dominate the groups, that aren’t core Americans.
But then that runs into the problem of how do you unite the welfare mothers, the LGBT groups, the immigrants, and so on, who don’t have anything in common.
And so what the Democrats and their allies in the media have been doing, consciously or unconsciously, is sort of “Well, we can unite them by having them all resent and demonize the core Americans.”
And so this has been the main engine of divisiveness in America. But of course it’s done in the name of diversity. And diversity can’t possibly be divisive, as we’ve been told.
So the particular problem for the Democrats, though, is by sentiment, by theory, they sort of feel like they need to give pride of place to blacks.
And blacks, as we’ve seen since 2020, can be very demanding and cause quite a few problems. And so it’s starting to alienate some of the other fringes.
We’ll see, you know. The media still has tremendous power to frame the Narrative. And this is totally not the Narrative they want to frame.
[PETER] Does anybody else want to comment on that?
[DERB] I totally agree with what Steve said. But I was a little disappointed to hear him say LGBTQ!
I have been propagandizing in my podcast and my monthly diaries for something better than that, something more sayable. And I have come up with what I do believe is a perfectly good way of saying that without going through all the alphabet and without really causing any offense to anybody. Since those sexually diverse groups are always having Pride Marches and Pride Parades, I suggest we just call them the Prouds!
[QUESTION] Going to the point of the demographics of voters, I just want to make it a simple observation and maybe get some comment on it.
In 1960, the United States was 90% white.
Today it’s about 62%, maybe.
So there’s your Great Replacement, that they say doesn’t exist.
But my point is that if the white vote, they’re 60% of the population, roughly. So if whites voted the way blacks do, 90% in unity for a particular candidate, that would be roughly 54% of the total vote.
We could win every election, at least the national: president — we could determine every presidency — if we just voted the way to the blacks do.
And we wouldn’t need a single non-white vote. We’d have that 54%, even if we got no votes from any of the other ethnic groups.
And I wish somebody would address that, please.
[PETER] Well, Steve did address about 15 years ago in VDARE. And he calculated that, even without immigration restriction, the GOP/ GAP could continue to win elections well into the middle of the century, just by racking up higher shares of the white vote.
It’s not unreasonable on its face that they could get to at least 75% or maybe 80%. In some Southern states, nearly 90% of the white population is already voting for the Republicans — not that they deserve it, of course.
[STEVE] Yeah, it’s, it’s basically: Will whites across the whole country vote like white Southerners?
So white Southerners have typically won elections.
But lately Georgia is going purple and maybe blue. Texas manages to stay red, knock on wood.
A lot of it is that it depends on the composition of the minority groups.
One of the first analyses I did after the 2000 election looked just at states, Red or Blue. The white vote went very Republican.
If the Democrats were highly black, if they were Latino,whites were kind of average in the Red/Blue split.
If the big minority was Asians, then the whites tended to vote Democratic.
So a lot of it comes down to is, is diversity working out in that state?
[PETER] Jared?
[JARED] For you political history buffs, who in this room knows when the last time a Democratic presidential candidate was elected with a majority of the white vote?
That’s correct. You go to the head of class — 1964.That means every Democrat president that was voted in was voted in against the wishes of the majority of white people.
I think that’s something that needs to be emphasized over and over and over.
And of course the problem with white people is that they are liberals in the sense that Robert Frost defined liberals, someone who can’t take his own side in an argument.
And we have for decades now been incapable of taking our own side in an argument.
And that’s of course something that’s got to change.
And I see that gradually beginning to change.
[PETER] Where?
[JARED] Well, on the one hand, you can say that books like that of Chris Rufo or Richard Hanania or this Carl fellow that have just come out, their reactions against some of the absolutely outrageous anti-white ideas and policies that have stemmed from May 22nd of 2020, when George Floyd ascended into heaven.
All of this was unleashed upon us with an intensity and with no resistance — I was completely surprised. I’ve had my fingers on the racial pulse of America for 30 years, 35 years now. And I never expected this.
So on the one hand, these people are certainly on our side because they’re fighting the excesses of CRT and the implication that everything about white people is disgusting and awful and Fhas got to be changed.
But they’re not really on our side because, ultimately, it seems to me, they want to go back to a kind of Martin Luther King image of everybody is to be judged by the content of his character.
So in that respect, there is a certain amount of pushing against this virulent anti-whiteness. And that, to me, is a first step to an understanding that we as whites do have an identity and a destiny that we must hold in our own hands.
It’s the first step.
[HARRISON] If I can just add to that, I was actually overhearing a conversation between somebody in the crowd earlier who pointed out that you can actually say “Anti-White “now, that’s actually entered into the vernacular. You still can’t say pro-white, nobody will say they’re pro-white, but you can admit that these policies are Anti-White. Which again, to me, it just seems obvious when you see this blatant anti-white rhetoric, how can you not oppose that?
If you do truly believe the things you say about everybody being treated equal, then white people has to be included in that.
To be Pro-White now is a defensive maneuver against the Anti-White agenda that is so obvious.
I’d also say the Great Replacement, Elon Musk tweeting out a speech by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, I mean, that’s now very much in the in the zeitgeist, the idea of the Great Replacement.
I’d say even better word for it would be Replacement Migration because if you search Replacement Migration, it actually links directly to the UN policy called Replacement Migration that’s been public for 20 years at this point.
So it’s not exactly up for debate whether that exists or not.
[DERB] As an amateur student of linguistics, I’ll just add that we shall know when the term Anti-White has ascended fully into the standard vocabulary, when nobody ever hyphenates it anymore.
[KEITH] I’ll just ask a follow-up question. I know the conventional wisdom is that non-whites are going to fall on the left side of the spectrum, but I wonder if recent years have made you rethink if Republicans can win over more non-whites.
I mean, I know, they were very excited about many Hispanics voting for Trump. But if you look at the U.K., leaders of the Conservative Party are Sunak, Suella Braverman…
There’s this huge Indian immigration to Australia and I’m not sure that they fall on one side of the political spectrum.
Do you think the new arrivals to the West are less fallen into that polarity — things have been post-racial for so long that they see the Conservative parties as just, you know, the low taxes party?
[STEVE] These are excellent questions. What’s different about America — where there’s this constant polarity?
South Asian immigrants to Britain seem to spread out over the political landscape to a certain extent, especially the Hindu immigrants, partly because the Muslim South Asians got there first and generally didn’t set a good example.
And so the South Asians tend to be more prosperous and bourgeois and middle class and go, “Oh, I am a Tory.”
That doesn’t seem to be true in the United States.
It seems like the Hindu South Asians arrive and immediately look around and take their political cues from the Jews, who are doing very well economically and have Left of Center political views, especially those in the media.
You know, if you look at like Jews voting broken down by marital status, you know, married men vote pretty moderately. But single Jewish women are extremely steadfast Democrats and they have become a huge voice in the media and tend to dominate.
And I think you see a lot of the South Asians looking to them as role models for their careers and following them. But that’s just a theory.
[QUESTION My question is more of a generational question, maybe something that Keith Woods or Harrison could talk about a little bit.
To what extent, how important is it to try to go into newer platforms, like, for example, video game streaming, like Twitch, just trying to different avenues and vectors of getting the message out there?
Has it been tried? Has it failed? Has Twitch shut you down? What are some of the things that are being worked on?
[KEITH] There was an interesting poll by the Homeland Institute a couple of months ago that surveyed people to find out how they came to our ideas, where they encountered ideas like the Great Replacement.
And the thing I was most surprised about was one of the highest avenues was video gaming. It was something around 20 per cent. And I have heard this anecdotally.
I guess part of this is Zoomer humor. There aren’t many limitations.
People like to go on these servers, be edgy, maybe some drop Red Pills. But, I mean, Twitch is extremely censorious.
There’s been a lot of success on Twitter. Even people that are de-platformed, they get their followers on smaller accounts to post clips. I see some random college Leftist professor and I click and some groyper is in the replies with a Jared Taylor clip as the top reply.
It’s a very interesting kind of guerrilla tactic to get our ideas out there. Because it’s hard for them to play whack-a-mole and keep all that down.
[JARED] Video games would be the last place for a geezer like me! I’m just still learning how to use email!
[KEITH] Well, you know, the ADL actually released a report last year on the emergency of Zoomers getting radicalized playing video games online.
There was a particularly famous incident where on Minecraft they created some kind of George Floyd Memorial on the map. The Zoomers playing this game rushed to desecrate the statue. I think it’s just an anomaly in that you go on there, you can discuss with everyone that’s in the Lobby, it’s kind of censorship free. It’s a difficult thing to censor.
I mean, what are you going to do? Have a moderator there listening in on every conversation of a gamer?
[HARRISON] Yeah. You’re talking real-time with strangers.
And I was going to bring up: it’s not just the ADL, the DOJ published something. I mean, about a month ago, there was a big push to censor video games[The Feds Are Coming for “Extremist” Gamers, by Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept, March 9, 2024].
So clearly if our enemies think it’s a big deal, we should probably recognize it’s a big deal as well.
[QUESTION] Peter, you mentioned the upcoming 2024 election. What do you think about the Democrats stealing the election again this year?
[PETER] Oh, I think it’s very serious. They obviously have every intention to steal the election. And until we get rid of mail-in ballots, they will be able to do it. On the other hand, I think the Republicans were taken by surprise last time, as usual. And I think it’s possible Trump’s margin may just swamp their ability to steal it.
[QUESTION] Thank you all for your work and for the conference, Peter. We’re all praying for VDARE.om and for your future ongoing success.
My question is not adversarial.
I am very much interested in hearing what you folks have to say — I’ve heard a number of speakers talk about, specifically, Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania in very warm, glowing terms.
Richard Hanania is an ethnic Palestinian but an ideological philosemite and IQ fetishist. Chris Rufo has mixed race children.
Is there a caution for us to be elevating these people, especially in the context of what many of the speakers have been talking about over the last few days, of taking our own side, fighting for our progeny?
I think Paul Kersey said during his speech, you know, we don’t want to pump the brakes, whatever the people doing today are doing.
We want to keep pushing them forward.
James Lindsay would be another one who seems to be animated by his love of atheism and homosexuality [VDARE.com note: Lindsay is a former “New Atheist” but the SPLC says he’s anti-LGBTQ, etc.].
Is there any concern about putting our energy behind these people, when we know categorically that they are not interested in what we’re interested in?
[HARRISON] I’d say they do a lot of damage to the institutions and organizations that we’re against, so, whatever their motive is, they do a lot of good work.
And I think, if you can look at people like Charlie Kirk, you can see the way he’s changed over the last few years. If you don’t ostracize them, I think they can be a valuable asset, even if they don’t agree a hundred percent with you.
[PETER] I think the point is, as the Marxists used to say, you have to exploit the contradictions.
When you find that there’s somebody inside Conservativism Inc. who is leaning our way, or who says occasional things which are sensible, that’s great.
We don’t want to Purity Spiral. We want to encourage them.
[QUESTION] Just to that point: Chris Rufo’s children are part-Thai and part-white, right? I don’t know anything about Richard Hanania. Donald Trump’s grandchildren, ethnically Jewish. Joe Biden’s grandchildren, ethnically Jewish. We’re advancing people who are biologically just not part of our community. They don’t share our heritage.
I agree with Mr. Brimelow, we should take advantage of these powerful people in these notable positions fighting against neoliberal hegemony.
However, we’re advancing people whose bloodlines are contrary to ours.
So I’m making a specifically non-ideological point. I’m very much concerned about the biological political aspects.
[SAILER] Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a winning political strategy.
I mean, my impression is that Chris Rufo, for example, is just extremely effective.
I mean, I can recall 2020.
Finally, he puts forward a term for what we’re seeing as racist — “Anti-White Hate.”
And he calls it Critical Race Theory.
And I’m like, What kind of complicated term is that? But the normies loved it.
It was great. It allowed them to unify and to speak up against what they were seeing.
And Rufo’s done this kind of thing, you know, a half dozen times since then. And made real progress against the President of Harvard and so forth.
So you need allies like that.
[JARED] For years, my view has been to be appreciative of the things people are willing to say and not to reproach them for the things they are unwilling to say. Especially having been in this for as long as I have, we’ve needed all the help and all the allies that we can get.
Let us not forget also that our approval of these people is not really what is going to make them a success.
What’s going to make them a success is recognition by the larger society.
And that is a key element in advancing what we think is important.
So again, they are fighting some of the same enemies, and we will never lose sight of the fact that their objectives may not be the same as ours, but so long as they take a few forts, then in that respect, they’re cannon fodder as far as I’m concerned.
[QUESTION] Thank you for everything this weekend. It’s been an amazing weekend.
I was down last weekend in Colony Ridge, Texas, which is the big migrant camp that’s growing down there in Liberty County.
And I went to the town of Liberty, which is all very nice solid white people, like you would meet anywhere in the country, salt of the earth types.
And I talked with people who were there on the ground. And they said that Colony Ridge is happening because of the local Chamber of Commerce guys are all from these Old Money families and they are profiting from it and they are making it happen and you can’t challenge them.
And they’re, you know, I assume they’re Republicans.
And then I did an interview with a fellow named Judd Blevins in Enid, Oklahoma.
And some of you may have seen this, he was in the national spotlight because he was elected to city council in Enid as a conservative, as a Republican.
Judd’s a military veteran, he’s a Marine — but he was at Charlottesville.
He was there at the protest. And the people knew that when they voted for him.
But the local Antifa groups in town, with the help of the national media, organized a recall, probably six figures, seven figures, they put into this recall election, and the local Republican mayor not only sided with them, but tried to recruit another candidate to help them.
I mean, these are flaming communists and the local Republican mayor did this and the local Chamber of Commerce put a full-page ad opposing him saying he’s going to be bad for business.
And he was a great city councilman, but he only spent like $6,000 on his campaign.
And he came close, but he was beaten.
So what my question is, is this, how can we form our own power block within the Republican party? Because, as I see it, this sort of business-first mindset, if you get rid of that element and make the Republican Party into something that actually serves the people instead of just serving business interests, that’s how you would win over a lot of the people who still vote Democrat.
[PETER] Jared, you ran an article about Blevins, didn’t you?
[JARED] I think really, really your question is a larger one.
It’s not just the Republican party.
It’s the whole country, its entire white race all around the world.
How is it that this great people has been duped?
How is it that so many white people, wherever you find them, have been tricked into supporting these ideas that will ultimately lead, let’s be frank about it, to their extinction?
So I know that trying to fight this denaturing of the white man, it can take different forms in different places.
But as far as the Republican Party is concerned — judging from the local Republican politics that I’ve seen just the last few years, there are many jobs in positions of relative power just begging for people to fill them because they’re not paid.
There’s no glory in them.
And the party absolutely needs these people to be precinct captains, district chiefs, whatever it is.
If you really want to make an effect on the Republican party, that’s where you start.
Now we may be lucky and have some capable, well-presented people who do take our side and who maybe were not at Charlottesville who can run. But those people will need an enormous amount of help from people who are unsung, unrewarded, but who are part of the infrastructure of the party.
That would be my advice, at least in terms of Republican politics.
[PETER] You know, I think it’s very instructive to think about the 1964 election, where Johnson defeated Goldwater.
(And when you think about it, Jared, when the Democrats last won the white vote really extends much further back than 1964 — because of course they didn’t win the white vote in Eisenhower’s two terms, more or less by definition)
So 1964 was actually an aberration brought about by an enormous amount of media power and focus on trying to suppress the Conservative Movement, which was a real thing.
And it looked like the Goldwater election proved that the Conservative Movement was never going to get anywhere in America.
But of course, just 16 years later, Reagan was elected — also an insurrectionary candidate, by the way.
People forget how much of an outsider Reagan was when he ran and how much the Republican Establishment hated him, even though they’ve now adopted him.
So I think you can over-interpret defeats like Goldwater’s and Blevins when you see the mass hysteria that was organized against them.
You have to ask yourself how many times can they do that?
Without it, eventually becoming ineffective.
Because of course, Goldwater’s ideas did dominate American politics for the 1980s pretty well until the disaster of the Bush administration.
[QUESTION] Thank you for taking my question.
Great conference, by the way.
One white pill I think we could take for the last few years, at least in my opinion, is how much the Mainstream Right is coming to our way — like in the UK, within the Tory party, mass immigration and grooming gangs, even though they don’t do anything about them, at least are no longer taboo subjects.
So my question is two parts.
How much how much of this is sincere?
And second of all, how much more successful can we be to you know, bend the Mainstream to our own ideas?
[PETER] Keith, you’re the closest to the UK — hope that’s not an insult!
[KEITH] Well, you have my sympathies trying to reform the Conservative Party.
I think a lot of it is cynical. Is it bad if they co-opt our ideas? We’re not in a position to gatekeep.
And you know, inevitably, these influencers with very large platforms, they have financial incentives, they have personal incentives — you know, sometimes having your talking points co-opted is winning.
And there’s a lot of that happening right now.
I think you saw an element of this with the Alt-Right, where it was suddenly very popular for people to talk about this stuff.
And censorship kind of killed that.
People realized they couldn’t have monetized Patreons and YouTube channels and so on.
But yeah, now it’s coming back again, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, these people are normalizing these talking points.
And we’re not, you know, we’re not in a position to gatekeep them.
All we can do is keep the pressure on.
I think there is a genuine shift in the consciousness, though.
I mean, you’ve probably experienced it as well if you encounter young political people on the right.
And I alluded to this in my speech.
That kind of business conservative mindset, it’s kind of a generational thing.
You know, like I said, the Milton Friedman Free to Choose stuff, it’s not really hip at the minute.
If you go to the Right, it is Identitarianism.
You know, there’s an older generation of conservatives there that maybe reluctantly adopting some of that.
But you know, they’re just talking heads.
And if you still have the radical movement that’s pushing the full message, how much can they really do to co-opt it as long as we’re strong on our points?
[DERB] Could I just say, someone said earlier that we should just drop the word “conservative” altogether [applause)].
I don’t agree. I love being unpopular!
Reading opinion journalism the last few months, it seems more and more clear to me that everybody in that little world has been reading Arnold Kling’s book about the three axes of political thinking. TK
He divides political thinkers into three big categories driven by, in the first place, progressives who are driven by an obsession with Who? Whom?
Who are the oppressors? Who are the oppressed? That drives the whole progressive movement.
Whites are the oppressors, blacks are the oppressed, men are the oppressors, women are the oppressors. Jews are the oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed. It goes right through the whole progressive movement.
His second category he calls conservatives.
Conservatives, he says, are driven mostly by a preference for civilization over barbarism.
And when I read that I thought, yes, that’s me.
When I have an opinion about large geopolitical affairs it always comes down to that.
I’m on the side of the civilized people against the barbarians.
Now, of course, there are terms to be defined there.
In fact, in my diary a year or so ago, I ran a segment about whether civilization actually is better than barbarism.
And there’s a case that it’s not. You can find that case in that diary entry.
I think if you just google Gibbon on my website, you’ll get to it because Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a very good narrative about that.
So that’s the conservative orientation. Civilization or barbarism?
Arnold Kling’s third category is libertarians.
And what drives them is a concern for liberty over constraint.
So they are what we know they are. They want to maximize human liberty.
Those are Arnold Kling’s three axes.
And I think that’s a good thought.
I think it’s well done.
There’s much to be said about it.
Well, heck, he wrote a book about it.
But I’ve been calling myself a conservative for most of my life.
And when I read his little definition, a preference for civilization over barbarism, I said yes.
So let’s hold on to conservatism for a while yet, please.
[
[STEVE] So just basically to win in politics, you need to get two of those three groups behind your side, and that’s always going to have contradictions in it.
But that’s how success works.
[QUESTION] May I propose we are the honest people.
I’m this forhonesty.com thing.
And I say we are the ones that actually honest, especially race realism and whatever facts we don’t censor.
And I think that’s the main thing.
I’m honest for truth.
And within that we can be we can have some different political opinions about liberalism and whatever things.
But the facts and the honesty and the scientific thing, I think that should be our thing against the real enemy, who are just lying all the time.
[STEVE] Thank you.
Yes, your two-word slogan for honesty.
That’s a really good two-word slogan that really boils it down.
So thank you very much.
[PETER] And of course, it’s essential to the scientific method, which in turn is being eroded. The erosion of the scientific method in academia in the last few years has been astounding.
[JARED] I would just warn against assuming that our opponents are dishonest.
I cringe when I hear people talking about media lies.
I don’t think the media are lying, that they believe what they’re saying.
I think very few people who are not certifiable psychopaths can go around all day saying things that they genuinely know are not true.
And if you are telling a lie, I mean, to me, it is a very bad practice.
If you’ve said something that was a mistake and somebody points it out and say, Oh, I lied.
Well, no, no, no, you didn’t lie.
A lie is a serious business.
Didn’t all your parents tell you, you don’t lie because a lie is knowingly telling something that you know is not true.
And until we have really strong evidence that someone said something that you knew was not true, I think it’s a mistake to accuse them of dishonesty.
They may be deceiving themselves, but that’s not a lie in what is to me, the morally correct understanding of the truth.
[STEVE] Yeah, I would probably suggest a positive and a negative version of honesty, which is don’t lie and a positive version of tell the truth.
So for example, The New York Times typically runs in recent years, 50 or 100 articles a year mentioning the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.
Now, yeah, okay. But are they being positively honest about current reality in America when they obsess over one event in 1955, over and over again?
Yeah, that’s they’re being kind of dishonest without actually violating the technical truth.
[KEITH] I would just say as well, there is something emerging, which I guess people here should be looking out for.
I know Richard Hanania was mentioned. I don’t know how big he’s going to be outside of Substack, I guess Hanania’s book is quite popular.
But these people will acknowledge HBD, they’ll acknowledge things like race differences in IQ, but they use it to defend the sort of right Liberal worldview.
I mean, you can look at Hanania’s stuff and he talks about these facts of HBD, but he’s for massive amounts of immigration.
He thinks the illegal crossings happening at the border, he thinks this is kind of a eugenic selection effect because if people are successful enough in crossing the border, they deserve to be in the US to be good migrants.
It’s kind of interesting to read because it shows that you can recognize all of these facts and still come to a worldview that’s totally at odds with ours.
So the question of value, and beginning with identity, has to be central. Because you have people like Daniel Dennett, who died recently, saying that if these facts of race differences in IQ and racial differences are true, they should be suppressed anyway.
It’s not lying, it’s just a value judgment because he starts with this liberal, pluralist worldview.
So I think that’s the level you have to really challenge it on.
[HARRISON] And I think the best way to define it is the oath you take if you’re testifying in a court case. It’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I think that trifecta will get you to the truth. And I always think that the media — their job is to tell you the truth, but leave you believing a lie.
So they’ll stick with the facts, they have to present the facts that can be proven, but at the end of the article, the interpretation that you’re left with is the opposite of reality.
So they’re very skilled in that. Because I agree they don’t lie, but they frame things, the way that they articulate things, the rhetorical tricks they use, leave you believing a lie.
They leave you with the impression of a lie even though what they’ve said is technically by the letter true.
[QUESTION] Yes, so the point was made here already.
So basically, they most of the time don’t blatantly lie, but lie by omission, not saying the whole truth.
So it’s a very important point.
But there’s one other thing that’s rarely mentioned.
There’s a thing called self-deception and Robert Trivers, a biologist, was kind of into this, but it didn’t go very far.
But somehow people know it.
They believe all this stuff, but somehow when they go in a black neighborhood, they kind of know what to do.
So there’s a self-deception, but they somewhere inside still know the truth.
[DERB] In a sufficiently well controlled totalitarian system, it can be very hard to know what’s behind a lie.
The thing that lingers in my mind when I was teaching in China, Communist China, in the early 1980s, when it was still under pretty strict control.
The college was quite near the police station and outside the police station was a bulletin board of all the recent punishments that had been handed out; and the occasional execution.
And I got into a conversation with my Party Secretary about this. At one point he looked me straight in the eye, with no discernible distress on his face, and said, “There are no murders in China.”
And when you get, there’s nothing you can say.
You’re saying to yourself, “Is he saying that because the Party told him to say it and he’s a loyal Party member? Does he truly believe it?”
I don’t know how you could ever get to an answer to those questions.
It’s just in the air.
That kind of thing is in the air in a totalitarian society.
And we are here in a sort of proto-totalitarian society, so there is some of that in the air.
I don’t know whether you can say that a person is lying sincerely or falsely.
Often you just can’t say.
But please remember, there are no murders in China.
[QUESTION] Well, I have to disagree with my great leader Jared Taylor, who is one of my closest friends in the world.
And the person I think is on it more than anyone else on the race issue that’s alive on the planet today.
But he is not without faults.
And he will know that, many of you will not, that my nickname for Jared is Dr. Pangloss from Candide, who always thought this is the best of all possible worlds.
And Jared tends to be what the Germans called a good believer.
He wants to believe good of people.
Well, coming from a genuine Presbyterian family instead of a family of Unitarian hippies who thought they were Presbyterians, I can remind Dr. Pangloss that there is something called the Ten Commandments that address well-known human faults.
And one of these is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
Which implies that there are people who do bear false witness.
And I’ll give you an example of one that there are such people.
I had a friend in school whose father was a former governor of Georgia. He and I were close friends.
I know of a certainty that this person knows that the story of the Leo Frank case is false.
That the story of the mobs that surrounded the courthouse chatting “Kill the Jew or we’ll kill you” is untrue.
It was manufactured long after the trial.
It was never mentioned in any newspaper.
He knows this is a lie.
He and I have discussed this.
But he’s been on television repeatedly now. He wants to have a retrial in which he will be the lawyer for Leo Frank.
And he looks into the camera and he assures people that anti-Semitic mobs surrounding the courthouse chatting, “Kill the Jew or we’ll kill you.”
He is lying, Jared.
He is consciously lying.
It happens.
[Applause]
[JARED] Of course, people lie.
And one of my favorite lies, of which I’ve heard, not of which I’m guilty, was the one lie, the one conscious lie that Stonewall Jackson told as an adult, it was during the Mexican-American War.
And he was leading troops out from behind a sheltered area.
And as usual, he was leading from the van.
And he jumped out ahead, bullets whizzing around his head.
He says, “Come men, there’s no danger here.”
So lies can have various purposes.
And I certainly agree that omissions can be tantamount to lies.
And that is the propagandistic purpose to which these half-truths are so often put.
But to say something that you consciously know is not true, I think we are too often tempted to attribute that kind of base motive to our opponents.
Perhaps I’m sensitive to that because so many people throughout the years have claimed to be able to read my mind, know my own mind better than I knew it myself.
And so I urge people not to indulge in that kind of mind reading.
[PETER] Well, Harrison, John, Steve, Keith, Jared, me, Ladies and Gentlemen — thanks very much!
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